


kid, you know you can't fuck with this

by postcardmystery



Category: Veep
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-30
Updated: 2014-04-30
Packaged: 2018-01-21 10:20:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1547174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/postcardmystery/pseuds/postcardmystery
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dan’s always wanted to be scary. He just didn’t realise that <i>caring</i>, that having something to lose, that feeling so sick that he thought his heart might beat out of his chest-- that this was the missing piece.</p><p>“If you ever touch Amy without her permission again, I will have you killed,” he says to Jonah, who laughs. </p><p>Dan squares his jaw, raises an eyebrow, does not laugh back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	kid, you know you can't fuck with this

**Author's Note:**

> Title from [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfOiWG8YTMc) song, which I imagine plays inside Dan's head every time he enters a room.

“You could have timed that better,” Amy says. Her hair curls just right, and her pearls are high and tight at her throat. She looks like iconography, like every wet dream Dan’s ever had since he was twelve years old. (A conservative estimate, at best.) Her nails are filed to the quick, to match his own exactly, not that anybody ever notices that. She’s beautiful, and terrible, a re-made reflection of what America asked for without ever asking. He’d die for her, kill for her, burn DC to the ground for her. Lucky, really, that he’s already proved it by doing the latter a couple times, now.

“No I couldn’t,” says Dan. He couldn’t, timed it like dropping the atom bomb. He knows what he’s for.

“Clean this up,” says Amy, and he does not kneel for her, but only because the upward jut of his chin is his equivalent of a bowed head. Amy rolls her eyes, but permits him to kiss her hand before she closes the door to the Oval Office. 

Dan closes his eyes.

“I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” he says, and across the West Wing, phones begin to ring.

 

 

They call him Lady Macbeth, which is meant to insult him, but the first time he heard it he laughed into the crook of Amy’s elbow, let her nails score into his back, knew his hands were exactly that red. They call him her rottweiler, her paladin, the shit-stain bloodstained bloody-mouthed power behind her gleaming throne. Her Secret Service callsign is Queen of Hearts, and his the Ace of Spades. His poker face is legendary, impassable, and he draws chips of influence towards him in a wave, the power broker on the hill who will break you if you try to claw power away from the woman he put on her pedestal himself. He loves Amy like he loves himself, only better, not as a mirror but as a consequence of evolution, her smile glossy and perfect, his twisting at the side, half Bond villain, half senatorial gravitas, all knife. His misdeeds roll off her like oil over water, and his smirk is a prison shank, an AK-47, the off-the-record quote that ruins you overnight and leaves no evidence whatsoever in its wake.

They call him the Kingmaker. He calls her Ma’am. She calls him _bastard_ , _husband_ , _Chief of Staff_ \-- and always, never, _the only man I’ve ever loved_. The balance maintains, and they _are_ the status quo.

 

 

For years, Dan Egan is formless, not-quite-finished. He is loyal to no one and to nothing, and although in his chest, somewhere, is a sliver of what in another man’s heart would be called _ethics_ , he sees the mountain he must climb and the blades he must leave in the backs of those already ahead of him on the cliff face. He’s looking for something, and if only he knew what it was, he’d be set.

“You disgust me,” says Amy, for the tenth or hundredth or thousandth time, and he does not doubt that she means it. 

If he is formless then Amy is malleable, squeezing herself to make herself smaller in order to fit into the cracks other people have left behind. She is beautiful and so, so smart, but fears her own power. She is forever lessening herself in order to never outshine. Outside the corner of his eye, she’s always there, sun-bright and vicious. Somewhere, between the two of them, the answer lies. 

Selina, of course, is a Platonic Form. She is a hurricane, a tornado, a star to which Dan can finally hitch his wagon. He has never felt loyalty before, but backed into a corner he backs Jonah against a wall, rage thrumming beneath his skin and his fists itching to ball until his knuckles turn white. Oh, he’s felt rage before, but his territory has always and forever only encompassed himself, but he’s learning a new way to understand _mine_ , and the words come out before he even noticed they were gone. _My office_. 

Jonah pretends not to be afraid and Dan bares his teeth, wonders if there would even be consequences if he broke Johan’s kneecap clean in two. He doesn’t, but he wondered. The desire marks the change. Jonah tries to piss through Dan’s letterbox, and Dan knows that Jonah should thank the God he probably doesn’t believe in that he picked Dan, and not Amy, because Dan’s vengeance will still be swift and terrible-- but. 

Dan’s always wanted to be scary. He just didn’t realise that _caring_ , that having something to lose, that feeling so sick that he thought his heart might beat out of his chest-- that this was the missing piece.

“If you ever touch Amy without her permission again, I will have you killed,” he says to Jonah, who laughs. 

Dan squares his jaw, raises an eyebrow, does not laugh back.

 

 

“I don’t love you,” says Amy, the second time after the first time that she’s spent years telling him she never wants to discuss, ever again.

He’s only just got used to being scary when he realises that he’s scared, that he hoped that because he was the only one who saw her as she truly was that perhaps she saw him, too, saw past the tongue made of silver, razorsharp, and knew that when he told her she gained weight it was pulling pigtails, that it was only because he couldn’t bear how much more it made him want to fuck her. Their one time together they weren’t grown ups, not really, and now she is a woman, and he would do anything, _anything_ , to pull down her sensible pantyhose and go down on her until his jaw ached.

(His sole -- well, okay, not really -- regret about their encounter: she still believes he’s shitty at foreplay. He’d just wanted her so much, was so desperate with it, that he followed her lead, only realised afterwards that he’d failed to be a gentleman. Much, much later, he realises that, of course, she never wanted a gentleman, and he’ll never be one, not even for her, because she’d never want him to be, but: he ought to have let her climb onto his face and hold on. _Let_ might perhaps be the wrong verb. He’s come untouched, every now and then, just from wetness on his lips and his fingers digging, deep, into healthy thighs. He’s not even a little bit ashamed.)

“I don’t love you, either,” he says, and his poker face, it’s the best one on the Hill.

 

 

Selina wins because the woman is a force of nature, and her smile in her inauguration photo is a glimpse at how merciless God’s angels must be. Dan does not love her, but realises that despite her fuck-ups, their fuck-ups, that he respects her, this woman who has made herself a phoenix out of a failed marriage that ground her into the dirt, that has smiled with perfect white teeth in a perfect straight line through a thousand thousand little drip-drops of misogyny, who let them burn her only because it made her stronger. 

“You were my loyalest soldier,” she says to him, like it’s a surprise, and he doesn’t blame her, because it surprised him, too. The night is still and quiet, the kind of time where you can tell truths that will never ever be repeated.

“You were the surest bet,” he says, which makes it sounds like he was hedging them, but he wasn’t, not really. He is finding the shape of himself, and his is not the smile of a POTUS, heavy will not be his head, wearing the crown. He was born to stand beside a throne, to occasionally kneel before it, and to scatter nails on the ground as he stands up, so all who try to unseat the queen try and fail, and fail, and fail.

He wants to ask Amy to marry him, that night, to whisper into her skin that he will make her the most powerful woman -- person -- on earth, but he doesn’t. He needs her to understand that he does not want to reshape her to his will, nor to unmake her, as he has watched several men try to do, but to show the world the Amy only he appears to see. He wants to marry her because he loves her, and he knows himself well enough by now to know that she’s it, that the constitution of his world can never be amended. 

He fingers her up against the wall of the Oval Office, Selina gone to bed, almost insensible with exhaustion, and Amy pulls his hair so hard that some of it comes out in her hand, blood at the root. He loves her and he can’t tell her and if she never wants to know then he won’t, because there’s no victory in that and if they can’t win together-- well. Worlds tilt on their axis sometimes. Ask the stupid motherfucker who thought that Selina Meyer would be happy being merely the moon to his sun.

 

 

It takes two years. 

He tears the Senate to pieces because it won’t obey Selina, and they whisper about him, _did he really threaten to send a nail-bomb to Senator Carlson_ , _I heard he held a fish knife against the French President’s throat_ , _cross Dan ‘Dynamite’ Egan and you’ll burn_.

Amy is solid, stable, the centre of the storm but never beaten by it, never weathered but always weathers. She stands strong through wars, through Selina’s second marriage, through the inevitable scandals that come from a government full of rich white men who were never really _that_ thrilled about playing second fiddle to a tiny woman in six inch heels.

“I think we should get married,” she says, at a ball where Dan’s eyes are tracking the room, half-unconsciously, looking for the congressman he needs to corner in the toilets and convince to do Selina’s bidding or drown. (Possibly actually in one of the toilets.)

“Why?” he says, although he doesn’t want to, and he laughs, almost, at how offended the face she pulls turns out to be.

“For the good of the party, of course,” she says, and Dan does laugh, then, says, “Well, if you put it that way. How can I refuse?”

 

 

They marry on a quiet day in May, and take an office-approved honeymoon to a cabin in the middle of nowhere in Maine. Phones are banned -- although they both covertly break that rule so often they have to construct a sexual favours system based not on transgressing the rule but on being smart enough not to get caught -- but it does feature battery operated devices quite heavily. A third of their time is spent in screaming fights, a third in screaming fucking, and a third in planning how to make Amy the natural successor to Selina, an ideological political dynasty that could stretch down another generation, maybe, which is when they realise that if they make Catherine Amy’s heir apparent they’ve got it locked in for life.

“I always liked that girl,” says Dan, approvingly, “Not as much as Jonah, admittedly, but as a side benefit she’ll murder him, probably.”

“If you sleep with her I will cut your dick off while you’re sleeping,” says Amy, trying to look like she doesn’t care and failing. (The one thing they need to work on: _her_ poker face.)

“Please, sweetie,” says Dan, hissing out the endearment, pulling her on top of him so her weight crushes him just right, “I think we both know that if you cut my dick off you’d do it when I was awake. How else would you glory in my screams?”

“It’s about the only use I think I’ll ever find for your dick,” says Amy, which is the best kind of lie they tell: one they both know isn’t true.

 

 

“No turning back now,” says Dan, forty-two and his hair greying, a little, at the temples, letting the iconography of who came before him tell the story that it makes him look distinguished, stateman-like, trustworthy. (Ha.)

“All I’d see if I turned back would be you looking at my ass,” says Amy, and click-clacks down the corridors of power in heels it took her three months to learn how to walk in. (And a hot-as-fuck three months those were.) 

Dan grins at her, lethal, and she holds out her hand, says, “We both jump, asshole.”

“So long as you tell me how low to go down after,” he says, raising an eyebrow, and pushes open the door so she can go out first.


End file.
